


The Wolf's Tale

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: Myth Shorts [1]
Category: werewolf myths
Genre: Extinction, Feral Behavior, Infection, Non-Graphic Violence, Other, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 12:21:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4828967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wandering wolf recounts learning to change shape and creating the first of his kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wolf's Tale

The daughters of heaven mock me beneath the barbed wire angels they set to guard. It is always thus—a fence and its thorns, a house, a wolf they have made soft-bellied. I watch them behind their windows as they tide toward sleep, carried out to the furthest shore and leaving behind flesh, supple and sweet. How can such a defenseless thing live so long? If only I were to lick their petting hands, I could join them there and live a long and well fed life. The fat bellied dogs assure me of this, as they assure me that it is pleasant not wander, and that the empty sacs between their legs did not hurt as bad as I might think.

I do not know if it is a sickness they eat with their food or simply laziness like a drug that pulls them down. I growl at them and they laugh at me, safe behind brick, wood, and wire. Perhaps the ladder of my ribs is funny to them as they say, fur clotting above it that I rarely care enough to groom. If I found my people, I would care more. All I know is that they will leave a scrap and let me travel on. Their pity troubles me no more than their contempt, and I pass them without much challenge.

So many places are guarded now, the blight of asphalt and concrete spreading like mold and taking with it every scrap of green. The daughters of heaven plant little strips of it back, too small for a home and to tame for a bed. I leave my mark there any way to confound their dogs, the rank smell of it like a slap in their faces. Where I go, I remind them of the wild.

I have found bitches in heat on my travels, their tags ringing for the ear of their owners, and left something of myself. I wonder sometimes if I will pass this way and see my eyes though the slats of a fence. I have not, yet.

The daughters of heaven force us to share their dream of the world, and from them I learned to change my shape. What a strange power, to see only what one expects and bend the world around it. In the wolf dream, before it faded, I saw their ape fathers start to walk upright, and felt the fear of the first fire, their shadows hard against the dancing flame. It was the flame that let them sleep, to knock stone to stone and make a weapon we did not need to see.

They fascinate me, but too many times have I come close in curiosity and nearly been trapped there, a man-form that would forget the pleasure of a hunt. It is not hard to disappear. I need only submit to their sweet and pallid happiness. The first time, I ran naked into the night, fur sprouting from my crawling skin. The screams behind me faded quickly.

I have learned to pretend to them since. Their power is their weakness, and it makes them blind. They expect to see another child of heaven and I give it to them. I have eaten enough of them to know that if I eat more, heaven will eat me up.

How contagious they are. We could not have known those first faltering steps would let them stand upon us all. In the wolf dream, we watched them take those steps. Then we chased them back into the trees.

We are all smaller now, as if they stole it from us.

I must find someone to pass my small fragment of the wolf dream to, lest it fade away entirely. The feral cats in their tribes do not care, and the birds do not remember but for the ravens, but their dreams are of blood and the warm meat of war. They are preoccupied by calling out for their mother to come back and lead them to such feasts. The bears merely mourn.

I do not speak to the plant eaters. One does not gossip with lunch.

I can be the bearer of good news for the ravens, at least. The daughters of heaven have made bows to kill as no other creature kills, and they are not shy to use them. Perhaps even they realize, soft in the arms of their terrible dream, that they are suffocating.

The daughters of heaven are cruel as no other creature. With any luck, they will destroy themselves, but it does not solve my problem.

It was desperation that made me do it. Can I not fight against the last death, against the wolf dream fading into their dreams of things and things and tools and the world they believe is theirs?

It was desperation that made me dream: if the daughters of heaven may bend the world around them with desire, can I not do so?

If there are so many of them, can there not be many of us?

I chose a bite for it because it made me laugh. They have eaten us, and I have eaten them. The daughters of heaven eat each other, but not as fast as they whelp.

They like to touch the wild, to pretend they can take it up then put it down. I chose my form for it, for their dreams of strength useless and pretty, for their dreams of power that submits to them.  Tall and dark, the ladder of my ribs padded in a muscle that has never known work or scar.

I think the leather is a nice touch, a small reminder of predators and prey.

They do not know their power, but I do. I know too much of irony and sarcasm to be a wolf, and I am not vicious enough to be a man.

The first night, I bit five of them before their angels made me escape, four-legged and invisible, into the darkness. I stayed to watch it take them, my wolf dream under the eye of the full moon, their skin splitting and fur running over them like a wave. They were horrified as it happened, screaming hoarsely in their crippled speech, then they were becalmed.  We are calm if we are not rabid or in the intoxication of the hunt. There is no waste in being a wolf.

It was then I approached them. I had to tear out the throat of only one before they accepted my dream.

They say it is like coming home. Those daughters of heaven, my daughters and sons, tell me that heaven’s price for their dream is a million severed links they fill with the sounds of their mouths, but can never repair. They glory in the small, head-blind connection my dream has given them, seeing it as a gift. I have not told them that this is their dream infecting mine and I will not tell them.

If they think they have been granted special power, I will not take it from them. I amuse myself on occasion thinking of their reaction to wolves, and what a wolf would think of them. My sons and daughters are careless as puppies and malicious as human children.

They will help each other this way, but they will never be wolves and they can no longer be man. I share their dream and mine, a dream of a hunt and the skill of the body that rewards the swift. They learn the hunt as a fish learns water, and I have seen them pause on the cusp between hunger for flesh and heaven's hunger for destruction. There is only so long that I may keep them thus.

I am growing old, too old to join those hunts, but I will lead them on a last one.

They are man enough to eat me. In their wolf dream, I will live on.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously this sucker is a bit poetic and kind of oddly vague in spots. Hopefully it's not so vague that you can't figure out what he's up to.


End file.
